Hello, Picaddilly, Hello, Leicester Square
by Beatrice Otter
Summary: Diana can't go back to Themiscyra. She can only go forward into a new world and a new life.
1. Chapter 1

Etta knew before they made it back, that Steve was dead.

"But we could not call or send a message," Diana said, brows furrowing.

Etta sighed and took the strange woman's hand. "That's _how_ I knew, dear. Steve was the one with all the codes … and Steve was the one most likely to be able to charm himself the use of someone's phone or telegram office if those codes didn't work."

"Because he was a spy, used to lying and manipulating?" Diana asked. "But Sameer is a con artist, which means he is also skilled at lying and manipulating. That is how we got back to England."

Etta looked Diana up and down, in the nurse's uniform that didn't sit quite right, at Sameer in an orderly's uniform. Charlie was in his regular uniform, and she presumed Chief was, too; she'd never met him in person but he seemed to fit the way Steve had described him. "I can see that," she said.

"But Diana," Sameer said, "Steve wasn't as good at lying as I am, but there were a lot of stories that he could tell that people would believe from a blond, blue-eyed American that they'd never believe from me."

"Exactly," Etta said. "Anyway, it was always a long-shot of a mission, wasn't it? And then we heard that _something_ big had happened at Veld, but no word from you. That was … either Captain Trevor was dead, or he was badly injured."

"He is dead," Diana said. "He died destroying a plane filled with poison gas enough to kill everyone within fifty miles."

"He'll get a medal for that," Etta said. "Not that it matters, with him not around to enjoy it." She bit her lip and looked down at the floor.

"What is a medal?" Diana asked.

Etta looked up at Diana, but either the other woman was the best liar anybody had ever seen, or she was entirely sincere. More than ever, Etta wanted to know where Steve had dug up the strange woman.

But—she glanced around at her fellow secretaries, all industriously working away and studiously not looking at her or the strange party of people gathered around her desk—this was not the time or place to share stories.

"Why don't we find a better place to talk?" she said, standing up and gesturing for them to follow her out of the secretarial pool. Steve didn't have an office of his own, being so seldom in London and space being at a premium, but he was hardly the only Intelligence officer in the same straits and there were a few rooms set aside for them to use for private conversation when they needed it.

The private rooms were up a floor on the other side of the building. It had always been inconvenient, but it did mean that they were out of the way. The one Etta chose wasn't large, and there weren't enough chairs, but it had a door that locked and thick enough walls that you couldn't hear what was going on inside, which was more than enough for their purposes.

As she led them there, she could hear the men explaining medals and such to Diana.

"Captain Trevor never did say where you were from, Miss Prince," Etta said once they were all in and the door closed behind them. "And I'm rather curious to know myself, considering how little you know about, well, everything."

"I am Diana, Princess of Themyscira," the other woman said. "Daughter of Queen Hippolyta and Zeus. I came to Man's World to destroy Ares, the god of war, and I have done so with the help of Steve and these men."

"You … what?" The one explanation Etta _hadn't_ considered was that the pretty woman might have come out of a loony bin somewhere, but that sounded like it almost _had_ to be the case, now, didn't it? Except why would Steve Trevor, who was ordinarily fairly level-headed, have dragged such a crazy person along through a battlefield? Diana was gorgeous, but Steve wasn't one to let a pretty face carry him off.

"It's true, Miss Candy," Sameer said. "We saw it!"

"Aye, that we did," Charlie said. "She and Ares were throwing tanks around, and lighting bolts, and she can _fly_! We saw her, with our own two eyes!"

"And she came out of that battle without even any scratches," Chief said. "I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own two eyes. I mean, deflecting bullets with her bracelets is a neat trick, but she walked across a field on fire without getting singed."

"I don't know that I believe the Ares she was fighting was really a god," Sameer said. "There's only one God, and his name is Allah. But certainly he was at least a very powerful djinn."

"God, hell," Charlie said scoffing. "It was the Devil, pure and simple."

Chief shrugged. "I suppose it could have been an Above Spirit, but why couldn't it really have been Ares?"

" _Thank_ you, Chief," Diana said. "Why do you not believe me that it really was Ares?"

"Because they're all monotheists," Chief said. "They believe there's only one God. Most white folks—and Arabs, like Sameer—think that it's a betrayal of their god to accept that others exist. And that includes Zeus and Ares and all the rest. So they have to come up with some other explanation."

"Well, whatever Ares was, I'd like to hear the story," Etta said. "We've only heard dribs and drabs. But whatever it was that happened, they've pretty much shattered the Hindenburg Line. It's only a matter of time before the whole German Army collapses. The Bulgarians and some of their other allies have already sued for a separate armistice."

"And then the war will be over and there will be peace, yes?" Diana asked, anxiously.

"Yes," Etta said. "Then there will be peace. Though I don't know what kind of peace it'll be, with so much damage and bad blood on all sides. But at least we won't be throwing young men into a meat grinder for no reason. But like I said, I want to know what happened out there. And, she said, gesturing to Diana, "you can start by telling my what this Themiscyra place is, what Ares has to do with anything, and how Steve got caught up in you."

"It's a long story," Charlie said, "won't you be missed?"

"Besides, we need to find some place to stay," Chief pointed out. "This isn't the front, we can't exactly just camp outside of town."

"A spy's secretary has a great deal of leeway, and nobody knows Steve is dead yet," Etta said. "And I'll figure out rooms for you all. But first, tell me everything."

The story took the rest of the day, largely because they kept getting side-tracked with things about Man's World that Diana didn't know or understand, and things about Themiscyra that the rest of them didn't. Etta decided that Diana would stay with her, and found rooms for the men in a dingy boarding-house that British Intelligence used to stash people they didn't want anyone looking too deeply at. They met again after supper, this time in Etta's tiny bedsit, because it had the most privacy.

"But what about your reputation, begging your pardon, ma'am?" Charlie asked as she ushered them in.

"Well, with Diana here in her nurse outfit, that should take care of some of it," Etta said. "Besides, we're all socialists here, so there's a lot less fussing about propriety and such."

"What is a socialist?" Diana asked.

"Someone who thinks rich people shouldn't be the only ones to get nice things and a comfortable life," Etta said. "I like money, I really do, but I don't see why having lots of it makes you better or more important than other people."

"Neither do I," Diana said. "Does that make me a socialist?"

"Hang on a minute," Charlie protested. "It's not quite that simple!"

"And it's also not important at the moment," Etta said. "We've got a bigger question: how to get Diana back home." She turned to the other woman. "I wasn't able to find out what happened to the boat you came to England on, and my authority as Captain Trevor's secretary is quite enough to find rooms for the night but not enough to commandeer or buy a boat for you. Or a plane, if we had a pilot. That will all take money."

"I am not going home," Diana said. She was putting a brave face on it, but Etta could see the pain in her eyes. "I cannot. I doubt I could find it if I looked for centuries."

"What do you mean, you can't find it?" Chief said. "It can't be that hard. All we have to do is retrace the trip you and Steve made to get to England. Etta, you know where Steve was in the Ottoman Empire, right? That gives us a starting point, it's got to be close by that."

Sameer shook his head. "No, that doesn't make sense. The Ottoman Empire is mostly landlocked. And they've been beaten back across the board. The only large bodies of water they've got access to are the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf. Those are all small and well-known with lots of people living all around for thousands of years. There's no _way_ there's a secret island hiding out in any of those places. I'd buy it in the middle of the Atlantic, maybe, but not the Persian Gulf. Or even the Mediterranean."

"Besides," Charlie said, "my brother's a sailor. It'd take five, maybe six days for one of our modern ships to get from Gibraltar to England, much less the middle of the Mediterranean. Double that, at least—maybe triple it!—for a sailboat. Steve wasn't gone that long."

Diana shook her head. "Themiscyra is protected by all of the gods, particularly Zeus and Athena. There is a barrier around it which no man can penetrate—at least, normally—and it moves. The stars above change periodically, and they changed in the two days Steve was on our island. The place he arrived is not the same place we departed from. And it will very likely have moved again since then. Without the favor of Zeus, there is no way to find it … and without the favor of Athena, no way to cross the barrier."

"And do you know how to _get_ the favor of Zeus and Athena?" Etta asked.

Diana looked down at her hands. "I knew when I came with Steve that I would probably never see my home again."

"You mean … you mean you're going to be staying here? For the rest of your life?" Etta wanted to comfort the other woman; she looked a lot younger all of a sudden, and it was obvious she'd loved her home. (Etta, herself, had been glad to leave her own home and never looked back, but then she'd at least known what she was getting into.)

But at the same time … just getting Diana into ordinary-looking clothes so she could pass for the few days she'd been in London had been well-nigh impossible. Every other thing out of her mouth was something strange and unusual. And good, too, Etta really liked the Amazon way of thinking from what she'd seen of it, but not conducive to getting her a job and a home and everything. And true, Diana was a goddess of battle, but there wasn't much call for them in peacetime. Which this would soon be.

Etta stared at the men, appalled. What were they going to do?


	2. Chapter 2

By the next morning, Etta had a plan. It was not a _legal_ plan, but it was a _practical_ one, and it would work. Steve would have approved, and that was all Etta needed. And it was simple enough—the lads in the forgery section could handle it easily, and one or two of them owed her favors.

The hard part, it turned out, was explaining it to Diana.

"I know eventually you'll be able to support yourself," Etta said. "You're a smart girl, and strong, and I'm sure you can learn any number of jobs to earn the money to pay for lodging and food and such."

"Like what jobs?" Diana asked. "I am not skilled enough at pottery or weaving or singing to earn my keep with them alone. I can fight better than anyone in your army, but I am not here to fight."

So Etta listed off jobs that were commonly open to women—factory worker, maid, nanny, sales clerk, teacher, nurse, secretary—along with a brief description of what each one did. She put in more of a plug for secretary than anything else. Not only was it, in Etta's opinion, the best job a woman could have, but it also would probably be the least worst fit for Diana. (Etta shuddered to think of the Amazon as a maid. Now _that_ would be a recipe for disaster.)

"None of those sound very interesting," Diana said dubiously. "I would like to work with children—especially babies—but I have never seen one before up close, so I would not know what to do."

"You've … never seen a baby?" Etta said slowly, boggled.

"There are none on Themiscyra," Diana said with a sigh. "Men are necessary for procreation, and Steve was the first man on Themyscira since we arrived three hundred decades ago."

Three hundred decades was, what, three thousand years? "Then how do you reproduce?" Etta asked.

"We don't," Diana said. "Well. Except for mother; she sculpted me out of clay and prayed to Zeus and he breathed life into me. Mother is a very good sculptor," Diana said wistfully, looking off to the side.

Etta gave Diana a moment for her grief for the mother she'd probably never see again, but her thoughts were racing. Yet again, her plans were thrown a curveball by Diana's mere existence. It didn't really change things in the short-term, she realized. And the long-term … well, they'd have to get through the short-term before that would even matter. She was curious, though. "How old are you, then?"

Diana scrunched up her face. "I am only a hundred decades old," she said, as if confessing she was a teenager.

"Well," Etta said. "I'm only four decades old, and Steve was younger than I was."

"Really?" Diana said. "You are all practically babies!"

"Most of us die of old age before we hit eight decades," Etta said. "And in the meantime, if we want to live we've either got to inherit money, or work to earn it. And whatever job you end up doing to support yourself, you've got to pass for enough of a normal girl that they don't lock you up as a nutter."

"Nutter?"

"You know," Etta said. "Someone who's not right in the head?"

"Like Charlie?" Diana asked.

Etta shrugged. "Sort of? Charlie's got shell shock, but not really bad enough to land him in the hospital. But you—nobody would ever believe you were made out of clay and come from an island protected by the pagan Greek gods. If you start telling people that, they'll think you're some sort of hysterical woman making up stories, and they'll lock you up and study you."

"But it is true!" Diana said.

"But that doesn't matter if they won't _believe_ it, and it is pretty …" Etta eyed Diana up and down "… unbelievable. Even if Steve were still alive to testify to _his_ own eye-witness, they wouldn't believe him; they'd say he had shell-shock, and he'd cracked. Without him …"

"They will not listen to us because we are women and they will not listen to Sameer and the Chief because they are not white," Diana said. She learned fast. "And Charlie?"

"Charlie's already known to be shell-shocked," Etta said.

"And because he bears wounds from battle, his word is no longer to be trusted?" Diana said, voice rising.

"On something as outrageous as this?" Etta said. "Yes."

"If people will not believe you when you tell the truth, it is no wonder everyone lies here!"

Etta flinched, glancing around. The walls in her flat were _very_ thin. "Ssssh!" she said. "I'm right here, there's no need to shout. Anyway, once you know how to act normally—what _we_ would consider normally, Diana," she said as the other woman opened her mouth rebelliously, "—then you won't have to lie. Just don't mention your past, and people will assume whatever is easiest. But until you're able to get to that point, to know what to say and what not to say, you need money to support yourself and a cover to explain away any gaffes."

"Cover?"

"A role to fill that will help you pass unnoticed," Etta said. "Like when Steve went to the Ottomans wearing a Luftwaffe uniform in General Ludendorff's entourage. They thought he was one of their pilots, so nobody noticed him. He could never have done that in one of _our_ uniforms."

"So you still want me to lie," Diana said.

"Well, yes," Etta said. "But this is one lie I can back up and make official. I am _really_ good at making covers, it's one of my favorite parts of my job, and the guys down in the forgery section owe me so many favors—it'll work out fine. And Steve would approve of this one, he would definitely suggest it and probably try to make it real if he were here."

Diana sighed. "What are you suggesting?"

"I am suggesting that you be a war bride." Etta smiled. This was clever, if she did say so herself.

"What is a bride?" Diana asked, brow furrowing.

"A bride is a woman who has just gotten married," Etta said. "You do … know what marriage is?"

"Steve explained it," Diana said. "It is where two people go before a judge and promise to love and cherish each other their whole life long, except they do not love each other that long. You want me to marry the war? How would that even work? Ares is dead. I killed him."

"No, no, no," Etta said, waving her hands. "Not war bride as in married the war, war bride as in got married _during_ the war to a soldier who met you _because_ of the war."

"Oh," Diana said, nodding, "that makes better sense."

"It does, doesn't it? But he really said it was about loving and cherishing?" Etta said. "What a masculine thing to say. And it shows a bit of a romantic side that I did not expect."

"What do you mean?" Diana asked.

"Well, most people don't get married because they love someone," Etta said. "I mean, that may be how they pick _who_ to marry, but not whether or not they're _going_ to marry. Men marry because they want someone to cook and clean for them and to warm their beds and bear their children. Women marry because they're expected to, because they'll be pitied and mocked if they don't, and because there aren't many jobs women are allowed to do and their husband will take care of them and their children financially. And only _men_ promise to love and cherish; _women_ must promise to love and _obey_."

"They must obey and do all the work around the home?" Diana said. "That sounds like slavery to me!"

"Even more so than being a secretary," Etta agreed. "I only have to obey when I'm at work, and I get paid my own money. There's a reason I'm not married, and don't ever intend to be. But if you say that to people, especially married people, they get upset."

"And you want _me_ to do this?" Her voice was rising again.

"Shhhh!" Etta said. "Only as a cover. Besides, widows have a _lot_ of freedom. If I could be a widow without going through being a wife first, I'd do that."

"Widow?"

"A woman whose husband has died," Etta said.

One thing about Diana, she might be naïve about what she called 'Man's World,' but she was very smart. "You want me to say that Steve and I were married," she said.

"Yes, I do," Etta replied, nodding. "It solves all our problems. Steve wouldn't mind; if he were here, he'd do whatever he needed to do to help you through this. He's got no family still living, or at least, none that he talks to, and they're all back in America. And not many friends here, besides you and me and Charlie and Sameer and the Chief, and _they'll_ all say whatever I tell them to. And, like I said, enough people in the forgery section owe me favors to take care of the paperwork angle. But if you're Steve's widow, you inherit all his things and all his money, _and_ you get a small pension from the government. A pension is when they pay you because they got your husband killed. It's not much—certainly not as much as you'd make working—but it will be enough to help out while you get used to our world."

"So I am lying in order to get money," Diana said. "Isn't that like stealing?"

Etta laughed. "Oh, my dear, in this case, no. Not in fairness, anyway. You ended the war, or at least made sure that it ended on a lot more favorable terms for our side than it otherwise would have—if they weren't such stodgy unimaginative old so-and-so's they'd recognize you as a soldier and pay _you_ for what you did. And _that_ would be more than what you'll get for a widow's pension, believe you me."

"But what about the generals who have already met me?" Diana said. "Steve did not tell them we were married, or going to marry—they will know something is wrong."

"Actually, most of them are such idiots about women that they probably assume you were his mistress or something already," Etta said. "They can't _imagine_ that a man would pay that much attention to a woman he wasn't sleeping with, especially one who's causing as much trouble as you did."

"They truly see women as having so little value?" Diana asked.

"Yes," Etta said. "I'm old and plump enough to be considered maternal, and thus part of the office furniture. You're young enough—or you look young enough—and pretty enough to be more of a target for men who want a wife or just want to get their leg over. In any case, nobody'll bat an eye. And given that men are so willfully stupid about women, I for one am quite willing to use it against them."

From there on, Diana had no major objections, and Etta was able to bring her around in time to leave for work. They made arrangements to meet for lunch to begin purchasing Diana the things she would need to support the ruse.

Etta marched off to work with satisfaction of a job well done, leaving Diana with a selection of feminist pamphlets, _Howards End_ , _The Job_ , and _The House of Mirth_ to occupy her time.


End file.
